US President Donald Trump’s decision to reduce US participation in military exercises with South Korea raised eyebrows in the face of North Korea’s ongoing belligerence, and the potential impact on the US-South Korean relationship – but Trump in this instance fits into an established historical pattern.
While the US-South Korean defense relationship often appears a relatively uncontentious fixture of America’s global diplomatic-military presence, from its earliest decades the relationship witnessed periods of flux beneath the apparently still surface. Various attempts were made by successive US presidents to reduce the US presence.
Most famously, President Jimmy Carter proposed to withdraw all US ground forces from South Korea in 1977, which sparked a firestorm of political and military controversy.
Although Carter backed off, numbers still fell dramatically over the following decades, from about 41,000 US troops stationed in Korea in the late 1970s, to within the 20,000s today.
That’s despite America’s presence in Korea retaining a fairly low profile as a political issue in American politics, at least until the most recent reduction in the scale of military exercises.
America’s ‘defensive perimeter‘
At the end of the Second World War, the US had no intention of maintaining a large force in Korea. The Korean Peninsula’s future was an open question at the time of Japan’s surrender in 1945. The peninsula was divided into a US zone of occupation in the south and a Soviet occupation in the north, both ending in 1948 when separate states were formally established.
The troop presence question held significance even before the Korean War. The US had only just withdrawn its remaining troops in 1949, just before the outbreak of the Korean War. Though it wished to build a democratic polity in South Korea, the Truman administration’s priorities lay with Japan and the Philippines. The US maintained a military advisory presence in Korea and supplied arms and equipment, but did not envisage a large permanent military presence.
Many argue the Soviet Union and North Korea were emboldened to invade South Korea by a speech by Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson before the National Press Club in January 1950. The speech underscored how low Korea ranked in America’s priorities by failing to include Korea in a list of the countries and areas in Asia the United States placed under its defensive umbrella.
Months later, North Korea’s invasion of the south underscored the peninsula’s importance for the Cold War and dispelled Washington’s perception that the Soviet Union would not resort to overt military force to further its geostrategic aims. It prompted a total commitment to repel the north; 36,913 US military personnel would die in only three years of the Korean War, not incomparable to the approximately 58,000 fatal casualties of the final nine years of the Vietnam War (1964-1973). The war ushered in America’s permanent military presence in South Korea.
Since the end of the Korean War, the US-South Korean relationship has been underpinned by a Mutual Defense Treaty. Under Article IV, the US has maintained tens of thousands of troops in the country.
Nevertheless, presidents attempted to cut back on the US presence throughout the Cold War. President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered a phased reduction down to 55,000 troops over several years, though numbers grew again during the mid-1960s.
In 1971, President Richard Nixon withdrew another 20,000 troops from the country as part of the “Nixon Doctrine,” which placed the burden for non-NATO allies’ defense primarily on the countries themselves. The withdrawal policy was buttressed by myriad assurances of assistance and further military aid, which partially assuaged South Korea’s anxieties.
“We shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility”
Richard Nixon, during his Address to the Nation on the War in Vietnam, Nov. 3, 1969
The withdrawals under Eisenhower and Nixon were carried out in a way that secured at least grudging South Korean acquiescence, but President Carter’s decision was different. Candidate Carter first floated the idea of a total withdrawal of ground forces from Korea on the campaign trail. His thinking was seemingly influenced by Nixon’s earlier successful drawdown.
Carter was concerned to achieve cost efficiencies in the military, apparently skeptical of the need for US troops in Korea and believing that a strengthened South Korean Air Force could defend the country. Once in office, he announced a phased withdrawal of all US ground personnel over several years.
A firestorm soon erupted. Influential sections of Congress objected to the withdrawals, passing legislative amendments directing the president to consult and update Congress on any withdrawals. Public sentiments were confusing at best, with a July 1977 poll showing that only 34% of Americans surveyed supported withdrawing ground forces from Korea, while a March 1978 poll showed 61% of Americans favored Carter’s plan to remove forces on a phased basis.
Unusually, the most vocal opposition came from the military. In a newspaper interview, Major General John K. Singlaub, the chief of staff of US forces in Korea, bluntly declared that a withdrawal on the announced schedule “would lead to war.” Carter viewed Singlaub’s comments as insubordination. Singlaub was reassigned to a post in the United States, but the cacophony of criticism continued.
A month before Singlaub’s interview, in not-for-attribution-comments, US Army General John W. Vessey, later to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told another interview, “We all were deeply opposed to Carter’s policy as increasing the risk of war.”
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General George Brown, testified before Congress that Carter’s plan was not in alignment with a Joint Chiefs plan to withdraw 7,000 troops over five years.
One public rationale the administration offered for the withdrawal was that the military balance between the two Koreas was satisfactory even without a US ground presence. Pressure mounted further when a revised US military intelligence assessment was leaked, which estimated that North Korea’s military was significantly stronger than previously projected. In the end, only 3,600 troops were removed before the withdrawal plan was scrapped in 1979.
Beset by calamities like the Iran hostage crisis abroad and stagflation at home, Carter’s administration developed a reputation for ineptitude. The debacle over Korea only deepened the sense of dysfunction. He would lose reelection to Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Carter’s policy on Korea represented the most comprehensive attempted revision of the US-South Korea military relationship, but ultimately Carter’s sentiments were not totally unique; despite Carter’s bitter experience, numbers would continue to fall in the following decade.
Unlike in the 1970s, by the late 1980s the consensus in Congress had changed; straitened fiscal circumstances made the Korea military presence an attractive target for cost-cutting. In 1989, Congress mandated a reduction in US troop strength in Korea from 43,000 to 36,000. President George W. Bush would withdraw another brigade to fight in Iraq in 2003.
Today, not unlike Carter, President Trump views the Korean relationship with skepticism. But unlike Carter, notwithstanding whatever changed equation may emerge after this November’s mid-term Congressional elections, President Trump seems able to count on support from his Republican Party’s majority in Congress.
The range of other domestic and foreign policy issues facing Congress also militates against the emergence of concerted opposition on Korea, at least on a relatively small change like a downsizing of military exercises.The wider downward trends in the scale of the US-South Korea military relationship makes Trump’s move less unprecedented.
“We Have 39,0o0 soldiers over there guarding you” is the way Trump phrased it – from “your next-door neighbor.” The figure Trump cited is incorrect. Though numbers vary by source, with numbers fluctuating due to training activities and planned rotations, figures indicate there are somewhere between 23,000 and 28,500 US troops in Korea, perhaps the lowest level since the end of the Korean War.
Frank Fitzgerald is a Research Ireland postgraduate scholar and PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at the University of Limerick in the Republic of Ireland. His work has appeared in Real Clear Defense, in the Irish Times and for Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTÉ, among others. He has also appeared on Newstalk Radio as a contributor.
